dynamic PPP request

[richb at pioneer.ci.net (Rich Braun)]

> I'm running Linux and there is a local internet access 
> provider that I would like to use but it only supports 
> dynamic IP address assignments.  I understand that PPP 
> requires a fixed IP address.  If this is the case, is there 
> a way around this requirement?

I'm surprised any of the access providers wouldn't give (or rather,
sell) you a fixed IP address, unless they are doing it at such a
low price they'd lose money if you stayed connected all the time
(break-even on a 24-hour 28.8K connection is about $40-50/month,
and I've seen more than a few charge less than that--banking on the
fact that few customers actually leave the connection nailed-up all
the time or consistently use a lot of bandwidth.  You can actually
pump enough data through a 28.8K link to cost your provider on the
order of $200/month--just set up a dirty-pictures web site on your
Linux box, post something suggestive to Yahoo, and you'll see the
results same-day :-).

Linux PPP supports dynamic IP addressing, no sweat.  Simply use the
'defaultroute' option and the remote address 0.0.0.0 on the command
line, and it'll install a route to whatever address is announced by
the provider's PPP server at connect time.

It's SLIP and CSLIP that don't support dynamic addressing, at least
not without various kludged-together scripts at connect time.  Dynamic
addressing is part of the PPP specification.

You can't point a domain name to a dynamic IP address but you can
certainly use it for net-surfing.

-rich